Well, James Cameron's epic, record-breaking, ground-breaking film is finally out on BluRay, so I high-tailed it over to the store and grabbed my copy the other day, so here is my home theatre review:
Now, don't get me wrong, I still think that the story itself is totally cliché, and from that standpoint it's nothing terribly revolutionary. But you simply cannot deny that it is one of the best looking movies ever to grace the silver screen. That said, you'd be hard pressed not finding someone who was not impressed by the 3D.
That said, there is some things very positive to say about the BluRay release, even though it is only 2D:
Hand down it is the best looking BluRay I have ever seen. James Cameron stated that when he was in the authoring/dubbing process that in order to ensure maximum quality he decided not to include any extra features on the disc to ensure he was able to use the full capacity of the disc, thus giving the image the least compression and the best quality. Well it has worked wonders! I had the bitrate monitor up and running during some scenes of the film and some shots top a whopping 50Mbps! That's roughly 20Mbps higher than most other titles, and the minimum rarely drops below 20Mbps. This extremely liberal bitrate for the video has enabled the highest details to be preserved in pristine quality throughout the entire film. Not once did I see any film grain, compression artefacts or artificial enhancement blotchies. The colour and detail in the CGI parts are fantastically vibrant and sharp, and the real-life characters and scenes are just as vibrant, detailed and impressive.
So no 3D yet? why is this you ask? Simple: not enough people have the right gear to watch them in the home. But us 2D only folk need not worry. After an interview with Cameron where he spoke about the BluRay release (in fine detail I might add... he is actually a very smart bloke and savvy with the tech jargon) he said that they were able to preserve a lot finer detail in the 2D version, and that the discs are, for the most part, better looking than the 3D cinema release in terms of detail and vibrancy. This is because in order to produce a bright enough image in the 3D cinema release they needed to ramp up the brightness and sacrifice some details and colour. This is because you are essentially splitting your light distribution in half to fill 2 simultaneous polarised frames for 3D. But with the 2D versions Cameron says they were able to perfect and fine tune every shot to be how they wanted it and the high-bitrate 2D transfer has given him the most accurate representation of the film's beauty yet.
A lot of home movie nuts will also notice the film's frame size is full 16:9 and not the letterboxed 2.35:1, so no black bars above and below your Widescreen HDTV's picture. Once again, Cameron wanted to make full use of the screen space to cram as much details on the screen as he could, enabling people to "be as immersed in the 2D version as they were in the 3D version". All that said, in summary Cameron seems to prefer the 2D HD release better than he did the 3D cinema release.
In terms of audio, if you are lucky enough to own an HDMI-based amp decoder with HD/losless audio support you will be in heaven. I was surprised it was only mixed in 5.1 (instead of 6.1 or 7.1 as some films are)... but that's hardly anything to scoff at. In my opinion anything more than 5.1 can be overkill if not used correctly, and not essential to reproduce great sound. Although, upmixing to 7.1 via Dolby's Pro Logic IIx gives very pleasant and accurate results for those who can't live without the full surround experience.
Now, for those of you still using SDTVs and DVD players you sadly miss out on literally 90% of the films splendour. That's not saying it looks horrible... in fact it's probably one of the best looking DVDs out there (once again utilising full disc capacity at the expense of supplements). But comparing the two it's like apples to oranges. DVD being a bag of apples and BluRay being a truckload of oranges... blue ones! So if there was any reason to go out and buy that HD home theatre setup, it would be this!
Well that's my little home theatre review. I hope you folks enjoy the film as much as I did... at least for the visuals, story aside.
-Cub. =o)
Now, don't get me wrong, I still think that the story itself is totally cliché, and from that standpoint it's nothing terribly revolutionary. But you simply cannot deny that it is one of the best looking movies ever to grace the silver screen. That said, you'd be hard pressed not finding someone who was not impressed by the 3D.
That said, there is some things very positive to say about the BluRay release, even though it is only 2D:
Hand down it is the best looking BluRay I have ever seen. James Cameron stated that when he was in the authoring/dubbing process that in order to ensure maximum quality he decided not to include any extra features on the disc to ensure he was able to use the full capacity of the disc, thus giving the image the least compression and the best quality. Well it has worked wonders! I had the bitrate monitor up and running during some scenes of the film and some shots top a whopping 50Mbps! That's roughly 20Mbps higher than most other titles, and the minimum rarely drops below 20Mbps. This extremely liberal bitrate for the video has enabled the highest details to be preserved in pristine quality throughout the entire film. Not once did I see any film grain, compression artefacts or artificial enhancement blotchies. The colour and detail in the CGI parts are fantastically vibrant and sharp, and the real-life characters and scenes are just as vibrant, detailed and impressive.
So no 3D yet? why is this you ask? Simple: not enough people have the right gear to watch them in the home. But us 2D only folk need not worry. After an interview with Cameron where he spoke about the BluRay release (in fine detail I might add... he is actually a very smart bloke and savvy with the tech jargon) he said that they were able to preserve a lot finer detail in the 2D version, and that the discs are, for the most part, better looking than the 3D cinema release in terms of detail and vibrancy. This is because in order to produce a bright enough image in the 3D cinema release they needed to ramp up the brightness and sacrifice some details and colour. This is because you are essentially splitting your light distribution in half to fill 2 simultaneous polarised frames for 3D. But with the 2D versions Cameron says they were able to perfect and fine tune every shot to be how they wanted it and the high-bitrate 2D transfer has given him the most accurate representation of the film's beauty yet.
A lot of home movie nuts will also notice the film's frame size is full 16:9 and not the letterboxed 2.35:1, so no black bars above and below your Widescreen HDTV's picture. Once again, Cameron wanted to make full use of the screen space to cram as much details on the screen as he could, enabling people to "be as immersed in the 2D version as they were in the 3D version". All that said, in summary Cameron seems to prefer the 2D HD release better than he did the 3D cinema release.
In terms of audio, if you are lucky enough to own an HDMI-based amp decoder with HD/losless audio support you will be in heaven. I was surprised it was only mixed in 5.1 (instead of 6.1 or 7.1 as some films are)... but that's hardly anything to scoff at. In my opinion anything more than 5.1 can be overkill if not used correctly, and not essential to reproduce great sound. Although, upmixing to 7.1 via Dolby's Pro Logic IIx gives very pleasant and accurate results for those who can't live without the full surround experience.
Now, for those of you still using SDTVs and DVD players you sadly miss out on literally 90% of the films splendour. That's not saying it looks horrible... in fact it's probably one of the best looking DVDs out there (once again utilising full disc capacity at the expense of supplements). But comparing the two it's like apples to oranges. DVD being a bag of apples and BluRay being a truckload of oranges... blue ones! So if there was any reason to go out and buy that HD home theatre setup, it would be this!
Well that's my little home theatre review. I hope you folks enjoy the film as much as I did... at least for the visuals, story aside.
-Cub. =o)